Open source startup Chainguard said it raised $280 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, adding to a rapid funding pace that includes an April Series D and brings its total secured in the past six months to $636 million, or $892 million overall.
The company said the capital will help meet rising demand for trustworthy, production-ready open source software as enterprises race to secure their software supply chains.
Chief executive Dan Lorenc said the company aims to make open source “trustworthy by default,” arguing that while open source underpins most modern applications, the way it is delivered and deployed can introduce risk.
Pranav Singhvi, a managing director and co-head of General Catalyst’s CVF, said the firm viewed Chainguard as defining a new category around trusted open source at the core of modern infrastructure, citing the company’s unit economics and capital efficiency.
Chainguard said it would use the balance-sheet financing to accelerate go-to-market expansion while preserving equity capital for product and engineering.
Chief financial officer Eyal Bar said the structure is intended to scale commercial efforts without diluting ownership, letting the business fund its growth and maintain flexibility to invest in areas of differentiation.
The company outlined recent milestones as it scales with customer demand: the launch of Chainguard Libraries for JavaScript, Java and Python to reduce the risk of malware insertion; Chainguard VMs, a cloud-agnostic environment for running containers; and a catalog surpassing 1,700 minimal “zero-CVE” container images across common application stacks.
Chainguard said its offerings are now available via Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud marketplaces, and it has added a chief information security officer and a chief financial officer to support growth.
It was named to the Forbes Cloud 100 and Fortune Best Workplaces in Technology lists.
Chainguard said its customers include Anduril, Canva, Fortinet, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Snap and Snowflake. Existing backers include Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed, Mantis, Redpoint, Sequoia and Spark Capital.
